Tag Archives: rant

In the spirit of great posts pointing out the difference between programmers’ assumptions and the real world (like names, addresses and time), here’s a more satirical, but sadly true, take on Apple’s new Macbook Pro.

16GB of RAM should be enough for anybody. After all, nobody has more than a handful of browser tabs open. And hardly anybody uses virtual machines. All browsers for testing run on macOS. Application’s memory footprints are not growing.

When you ask professional mac users what their biggest problem with their mac is, they all tell you “I wish my machine was 2 millimetres thinner”.

Shaving off half a pound of weight really makes a huge difference once you have put the computer in a bag, together with its charger and a bunch of accessories.

Every computer user wants a thin-and-light laptop. We should never, for any reason, compromise on thin and light.

Battery life is more important than power, memory or ports. But not more important than a second screen and an extra ARM chip to drive it.

Customers do not care if the brand new computer they paid premium prices for contains outdated chips. I mean, come on, it’s like so uncool to know what a processor is.

Nobody ever forgets to bring along an adapter. And all conference rooms are equipped with mac-specific inputs to brand-new projectors anyway, so you never have to be afraid to be stuck without a way to connect your computer to an ancient VGA port.

Nobody needs Ethernet, since WiFi is always as fast and as reliable as a cable.

When you order a computer, you always know exactly what you will need in the next 2 years, so there’s no need to upgrade. And computers are so cheap you buy a new one every year or so anyway. Especially since setting up a new computer with your applications and configuration is so quick and fun we don’t even provide Firewire transfer any more. All your data lives in the cloud anyway.

A touch surface is just as good as a button. I mean, who touch-types in this day and age?

The cursor keys are hardly ever used, so we can make them any size or shape that makes the keyboard look nice and symmetrical. Symmetrical is, like, super important.

When we switch to all-new ports, within a year or so people will get all-new devices anyway, so that problem goes away really fast. I’ve never seen a peripheral older than a year or two in the wild.

Since everybody has a smartphone, nobody uses cameras any more.

What else would you need ports for besides charging and displays? All data is easily transferred via internet, and a laptop is super ergonomic to use all day without an external keyboard or mouse. Speaking of mice, it’s all about touchpads these days, everybody prefers those over a mouse.

Still complaints about ports? Fine, get a Thunderbolt 3 docking station. Lots of choices for those, and super cheap.

Magsafe was a nice idea, but it turns out it has no practical use, since people tripping over a laptop’s power cable is only a theoretical problem. In practice, you only plug in to charge overnight anyway. Batteries last a long time used that way, no need to ever replace them.

If you’re an apple user, you won’t care if we charge a couple hundred bucks more.

We DO give people choices. You can choose between “no power and no ports”, “3 year old hardware” or “more than 2000 bucks”.

All this is coming from from a position of love, not hate. I’ve been using Macs since before it was cool, and I’m still hoping to again see a “Pro” Mac where Pro means “for Professionals” rather than expensive and fashionable.